We are reading a lot about Huawei lately and it almost all seems to boil down to how "evil" their business practices are. Is this WSJ in the Overton window spinning a manufactured consent?
We have short memories, not so recently the Koreans were the ones doing all the IP theft, but nowadays Samsung is legit. Or you can go further back to when everything except and IBM PC (or Apple) was a clone.
Going further back, in the world of automotive, when a special product comes out, e.g. the MINI in the UK, the first thing Ford does is to buy one and take it to pieces, cost the whole package and work out how it is done.
There are places I have worked where there have been cupboards full of rival products, tested to destruction. It is called research.
What is quite interesting with the narrative is that Huawei have got there in the execution of 5G and they are allegedly ahead. Imagine if Huawei got to setup a colony on Mars first, we could complain that they stole Elon Musk's ideas and throw toys out of prams, to ignore accomplishments and execution.
Clearly the Overton Window is defined on this, and woe betide anyone that ignores it. So how does one avoid flamewar? Humour always helps. IS there any original IP in this WSJ article? Is it actually novel? Have they stolen content from other articles? Have they nicked content from the Washington Post? Their Huawei trolling is far from investigative journalism.
I learned about this years ago, so I've not noticed a recent uptick in usage, but when I learned about it I did.
Obama saluted a Marine with a Starbucks cup in his hand and it was national news. Trump sided with a murderous dictator against a former Vice President yesterday, and nothing.
Anyone who pays attention to American politics lately has been experienced the Overton Window shifting a lot.
The Indians and others were buying British looms and disassembling them way back. Standard practice seems to be buy a few extra to rip apart and understand.
The cliche has it: We don't learn from history.
Everyone does this, here's an article from 2006 detailing this: https://www.wired.com/2006/02/teardown/
The point is, this kind of behavior - taking a stock product and disassembling it to its pieces - is not theft. The real theft that mainly originates from China (no matter if via the "legal" route of buying up Western companies or force "technology transfer" via joint ventures or via hacking) that does real damage is stealing the know-how in manufacturing which the original manufacturer has spent most of the R&D budget for.
I can go ahead, do a 360° photography of my toaster and its innards, but will I be able to construct one of my own based on this? Probably not, as I will need to figure out lots of stuff that are not visible/measurable in the final product: temperature/cooling cycles for plastic and metals, the precise construction for the injection molds that does not leave me with uneven colors in the plastic, ...
Same is valid for automotive parts or aeronautic/astronautic parts. Sure, I can buy a SpaceX engine and take it apart - but that won't help me to get the precise 3D print pattern they use for their chamber.
Going further back when I used to work in the bicycle trade it was even worse, I thought that my mate doing the bicycle design would at least be able to use a CAD/CAM package, but he was working off printouts sent through from China. We didn't have the design skills in the building at all. It was more of an approval process, but we were claiming credit for the design as part of the marketing.
a great point. this is a really, really important comment on this whole topic. i can't help but wonder if this phenomenon is widespread.
US companies don't fear a situation where Chinese design and engineering are equal or superior. this debate about IP theft is a smoke screen.
what US companies truly fear is Chinese companies that can market and sell directly to the US market because that's basically the only profitable thing US companies can do any more.
With the aforementioned example, the USP of the bicycle designed for the British market comes down to four holes. Bicycles designed for California do not need mudguards, in the UK we have rain and therefore mudguards matter. So get the four holes needed to accommodate mudguards and you can fairly claim that the bicycle is designed for the UK.
The rest of the bicycle product is a matter of specification, the parts are Japanese designed Shimano for the middle market (where there is sales volume and sufficient margin on units sold) and the general idea is to skimp on them and put Chinese/Taiwan made parts where the customer does not notice, e.g. the headset and bottom bracket bearings.
What has changed recently is that distributors no longer need retailers. So the brand website is nowadays with buy now buttons instead of 'find a shop' buttons. So long as the brand does not undercut retail all is good, but when shipping to the customer's door is free the local retailer is still at a competitive disadvantage. Bicycles are one of the few products hanging on, you can't sell electronics through a retail distribution model these days in the UK if you are a specialist brand, the High Street has died and you are not going to have stockists for something like a hobby level drone. With a bicycle you still need someone local to assemble it for the customer.
Where is gets interesting is when you have brands that go bust and get bought by Chinese companies. For instance, the company that made black cabs for the UK market went bust and now that is owned by Geely. They are doing great things to make the black cab electric, however, you can bet that the motor is not going to be wound in Coventry, even if the final production line assembly is done in Coventry. Same with Volvo. None of the electric Volvo cars are going to be made in Sweden by real Swedish people, they might change a few hub caps and do things that dealers used to do to cars, e.g. adding a rear spoiler and speed stripes for the 'sports' model, but the brand will be fine without it being a 'Chinese Volvo'.
In the deluxe car brands market there are things like Bentley, costing $$$,$$$ with the tank sized thing made in Eastern Europe, not Crewe. Or Jaguar Land Rover, you know that their electric cars are going to come from a contract manufacturer and not the West Midlands. But the buyers will be fine with that and wear the posh car badge as if there is nothing going on.
So long as the product has innovated and is new then everyone is happy. With British Leyland (Rover) it did not work out that way, we ended up with fake Rover cars made in China from scratchy plastics with lame engines and no crash protection that nobody in the UK wanted to touch.
The enemy in all of this is not crafty Chinese people stealing our IP it is the property speculator and the government that puts the land owning people at the top of the food chain. There have been four decades of policies that put the property speculators first so the only way to make money in the UK is through rent seeking. This works out if you can get a Ponzi scheme going but eventually it becomes impossible to have people doing things like teaching, working in shops or anything else that the rich actually need. The servants get priced out of their one-bedroom flats and cannot afford to buy.
But, we can pretend otherwise and wage war on China, selling munitions to Saudi Arabia to balance out the government books.
Honestly; how can you call it "theft" if it is done via buying or a joint venture?
Joint ventures are compulsory. What China does is extorting market access. As for buying: Systematically undermining them by price-dumping and then buying up the carcasses isn't exactly fine business practices either.
China is definitely going to be the enemy of the next 20-30 years, pitting a ruthless dictatorship against whatever freedom and democracy will be left in the Western world.
US also has much stronger negotiating power than China, and it makes international agreements that are mostly beneficial for them. China cannot do that.
For example, if you want to sell your goods in Western countries, your country is often required to join an organisation like WTO. But to do it, you have to comply with their rules. So basically, developed countries are setting the conditions for developing countries. Of course, it is their right, but then it is nothing like a "free" trade.
Also, disrupting Huawei's or Kaspersky's business in US without any international court case, without being able to defend itself, just because government suspects something, doesn't resemble free trade too. It resembles what China does though.